Emily Hays Photo
Schools Superintendent Iline Tracey listens to the Hill South Community Management Team.
Angela Hatley heard Board of Education representatives make the case for supporting a bigger budget. And she had a question.
“The state said don’t look for extra,” Hill South Management Team Secretary Angela Hatley pressed them. “So what’s your Plan B?”
The occasion Wednesday night was the monthly meeting of the Hill South Community Management Team (CMT) held at Betsy Ross School cafeteria on Kimberly Avenue.
Board of Ed officials were making their latest round of CMTs to pitch public support for a bigger schools budget.
After supportive or neutral responses from neighbors in Dwight and Westville, the New Haven schools’ budget road show slowed its roll in Hill South.
The New Haven Public Schools are staring down a budget that would increase by $10.8 million just to keep the lights on, according to the district’s new chief financial officer Phillip Penn.
While inflation has affected the schools’ budget, the state’s contribution to the local budget has flatlined. Meanwhile, funding from grants has decreased by $16 million in the last three years.
The school system has responded to this situation for the past two years with school closures and teacher layoffs.
What can the neighborhood do to help? Talk to your alders and state representatives, one of the last slides read in Wednesday night’s presentation.
“We have been the victims,” said Darnell Goldson, an elected member of the Board of Education.
On The Hook
Victims or no, the Board of Education needs to plan for a tighter budget, argued vocal Hill residents who attended the Hill South Management Team meeting.
Hatley (pictured above) said that she would be happy to lobby the state for increased education funding, but the state looks unlikely to send more New Haven’s way.
In that case, residents said, they do not want to be on the hook to pay for the schools’ needs through increased local property tax.
“We all recently absorbed an 11 percent tax increase,” Hatley reminded officials.
Hill South resident Thomasine Shaw told the schools emissaries to think more like a business. If a business is not making a profit, employees don’t get raises, she said.
After the meeting, Shaw compared the schools’ budget to her own efforts to repair her house, which she said was around 100 years old.
“Every year I have to do something to this house,” she said, but she holds off when she does not have the money. She would like to keep as much of her money as possible, so she can finish those repairs, she said.
Shaw said this reluctance does not change the importance of education.
“I’m for education. These kids are going to be my leaders,” she said.
Wealth Elsewhere
Penn (pictured above) assured the Hill South neighbors that the district does have a Plan B. It’s just not pretty. The back-up plan could involve cutting electives in high schools, decreasing the number of days in the school year, leaving teacher positions vacant and hiring less experienced teachers.
Teacher and NHPS Advocates member Leslie Blatteau said that the community mobilizes against teacher layoffs and school budget cuts and that she will help them to do so.
Blatteau thanked the administrators and officials for their clear explanation of what to do to prevent those cuts, like lobbying state legislators.
“Our kids need fully funded schools,” she said. “There’s a huge amount of wealth in this state.”
Former Hill Alder Dolores Colon presented another line of attack through state laws: a clarification that would require Yale to pay real estate taxes. This is the subject of recent organizing by union-connected activist group New Haven Rising.
As other participants in the budget road show began to pack up, Goldson (pictured below) joked with Shaw and other neighbors, “This is a tougher crowd than we’ve had so far, so this is good training for us.”
People tend to focus on the fact that our phenomenally wealthy non profits don't pay property tax and how that impacts our local municipal budgets. However there's an a more insidious part of tax exemption that frequently gets overlooked, and starves the state more directly. To use the University for example, as a tax exempt non profit everything Yale buys is also tax exempt.This eliminates sales tax on everything they buy, it removes the meal tax of 7% on all the entertaining they do in New Haven, it also means they don"t pay an occupancy tax on a single hotel room they book for official guests visiting the the University. For an overnight visit by a visiting faculty member including train fare, a cab ride, lunch, hotel, and dinner this could be $75 dollars in missed taxes. Multiply this by thousands, possibly tens of thousands of visits a year. This holds true for all purchases as well, gasoline, office supplies, everything. This is one tiny example from one of many tax exempt "non profits". Property tax is incredibly important to tackle, particularly as over half New Havens grand list is tax exempt, but its really only a small part of the story.